Storage Requirements Put Burden on Businesses of All Sizes

Management of inactive data (as defined by being unused for six months or more) appeared to be an area where the greatest improvements can be made.

The majority of organizations continue to use expensive primary storage systems to store infrequently accessed data, with respondents engaging in this practice spending significantly more of their annual IT budget on storage than their peers, according to a report from TwinStrata.
Survey results indicated organizations that use public cloud storage to store inactive data have a comparatively lower storage budget than those that do not, with 62 percent of organizations that store inactive data solely on storage area networks (SANs) or network attached storage (NAS) spending more than 10 percent of their IT budget on storage.
"Our survey brings to light an unspoken truth: Companies waste money storing their least important data on their most expensive systems. Today’s IT teams struggle under the weight of traditional storage tactics, leading to wasted budget and storage management inefficiencies," Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata, said in a statement. "By intelligently incorporating cloud storage into its strategy, an organization can redeploy both budget and staff resources to higher-value initiatives."
Management of inactive data (as defined by being unused for six months or more) appeared to be an area where the greatest improvements can be made.

Just over one-fifth (21 percent) of respondents keep inactive data exclusively on SANs or NAS devices, and 81 percent of organizations that use SANs and NAS in their environment store inactive data on them.

Only 68 percent of those who use tapes do so for inactive data, and a mere 38 percent of public cloud storage users keep inactive data there, the survey found.
Overall, the majority of organizations surveyed estimated that at least half of all data stored is inactive, with one in five stating that at least three-quarters of their data is inactive.
While 20 percent of organizations store a petabyte or more of data, a whopping 40 percent of organizations have less than 50 terabytes (TB) of data.
However, when filtering out businesses with fewer than 100 employees, the data was found to be quite different--now, 29 percent of companies are storing a petabyte or more, and the percentage of organizations with less than 50TB has dropped to just 22 percent.
The survey also asked general questions regarding the continued maintenance and management of storage infrastructure, finding around two-thirds (68 percent) of organizations purchasing additional capacity on an annual or bi-annual basis.
"Organizations face an increase in regulatory requirements that mandate many years’ worth of records, making data deletion more risky," the report noted. "In addition, as big data analysis becomes more accessible, the availability of many years’ worth of trending data can lead to powerful insights that can materially benefit the business."
Conducted in May, the survey, “Industry Trends: 2014 State of Storage,” collected responses from 254 IT professionals involved in their organization’s storage strategy.